The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (2 page)

"What do you think, Guardian?" Payden asked.

"I think we need to contact the Board of Wyrding, have them start evacuating wyrders to a safe haven," Aladestra told her assistant. Taking the frail man by the arm, she led him away from the gathered constables and the slain children. The hems of her golden robes were soaked in blood; she would need to get rid of them. She pushed the thought out of her mind. "Tell them that the corruption of the well is spreading into wyrders, turning them into husks of what they once were, bodies through which the Chaos in the well can work on the lands. The last time, they were called caustics."

Payden knew what the corruption in the well meant. Wyrders would touch their wyrd at great risk now. Simple workings could turn catastrophic, if they worked at all. And each working would call more and more Chaotic wyrd into their bodies, until they turned out like the teacher. Payden turned and looked at the slaughtered classroom.

"The caustics?" he asked. "They are returning?"

Aladestra turned with a rustling of skirts and surveyed the carnage. "I'm afraid so." She sighed. "Last time there was fear, people started hunting down wyrders and killing them so they didn't have to worry about the dangers of wyrd. It will spread like wildfire." She brushed an errant strand of blonde hair from her eyes, and led Payden further down the stairs. “Sorcerers can survive a great many things, only dying when their head is cut off. The hunters knew this, and some took great pleasure in testing that theory. Burnings, drowning, hangings — they all happened last time. Beheading occurred only after the torment was through.”

Payden swallowed hard, and was silent for a time.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" he finally asked.

"Yes, pray that it is cleansed soon."

"Where is this safe haven to be?" Payden turned his mind to something that he
could
do.

"I will trust the judgment of the board." Aladestra said, turning back to Payden. "We've always had shelter in the Ravine of Aaridnay. If that’s still available, then we will use it. We will still need a small staff of the board left here; they can take shelter in my suite in the Ivory Tower. Tell them the corruption is strengthening; what little use of wyrd we allowed before needs to stop completely. It won't stop the corruption, but it will stall it."

"We will need to increase the constables’ hours. They will need to help keep all citizens safe, wyrd or not. Double patrols, and call up reserves." As Aladestra spoke, Payden made notes.

Two flights down, she came to the skywalk landing where she could cross to the Ivory Tower. She stopped halfway across the bridge and looked out at her city: the Ivory City. The peaks of ivory buildings were painted a honey gold in the morning sun. It was hard to imagine what was going to come from the corruption. What messes would she have to clean up? What lives would be destroyed?

"Guardian, am I excused?" Payden asked.

Aladestra nodded. "Yes, you have things to take care of. Thank you."

She needed to contact the other Guardians and let them know what she had seen, what was coming. Her feet found the path to her office high in the Ivory Tower, even if her mind wasn't with them.

“D
ear Goddess.” Dalah came to a halt where a door should have been. She stood at the entrance of the altar room, deep inside the Mirror of the Moon. “What happened here?” She remembered this place from times past with the statue of the fertile Goddess standing in the very back of the room, her arms spread, welcoming all the parishioners to worship. The lotus flower lamps filled with unquenchable naolyn oil flickered in the pool at the statue’s feet. The sound of twittering birds and tree limbs creaking in the morning breeze could be heard through the gigantic hole in the ceiling. The hole had been created when the roof caved in, or at least Dalah imagined, since wreckage of the ceiling littered the floor of the altar room.

Though one could only speculate about the fallen beams, the shattered windows, the large graphite-like stone of the Lunimara, and the other general debris one would expect from a collapsed ceiling, Rosalee could see what happened clearly, for it was within the past that her gaze fell.

There was lightning, and there had been fire. The water of the bubbling pool at the feet of the Goddess had at one point been used as a shield against an insane amount of heat flung from Angelica’s hands. There had been little need for weapons. Even if they had been able to use them, Rosalee doubted they would have done any good against the dalua Porillon. Angelica and Jovian used wyrd as if they were the most powerfully trained sorcerers in the world. The problem was, they weren’t trained at all, and had shown little wyrded ability prior to this.

There was a growl from outside. With a hesitant glance at the shattered window, Grace decided it was nothing more than a normal animal and turned her attention back to the ruin of the room.

“I don’t think I need to tell you of the great battle that took place here,” Rosalee said. Her eyes were still focused on a past when the room was whole and three people battled within.

Three people but four consciousnesses. . .

She saw the lightning, the fire, the water. All of the elements on display in this very room, as Porillon had tried to eradicate Jovian and Angelica from the living world . . . and failed.

“No, I don’t think you need tell us what happened,” Grace confirmed, bringing Rosalee’s vacant eyes back to the present. What drapes had not been torn hung blackened and burned from their poles, the walls and floor also charred from intense heat. In fact, the only thing that remained untouched in the room was the statue of the Goddess.

With a few rapid blinks of her pale green eyes Rosalee shook herself and was once more back in the present.

“I don’t think it’s wise that you use your powers just yet,” Dalah said, looking around them as if the very room itself was going to spew forth numerous dalua and attack them. “It’s not stable yet, and I’m sure that we have all barely escaped the horrors that the rest of the Realms are facing by some sheer luck of the Goddess.”

“It’s not sheer luck which has allowed us to escape,” Grace informed her. “It has been our intelligence. She is right, Rose, now is not the time to become flippant with our wyrd. We need to stay focused on the present. I know that your mental abilities are born out of your extensive use of the flying ointment, but I’ve never been fully convinced that there wasn’t some kind of wyrd in your scrying. I would not like to test that theory now, not with what we’re facing. We must persevere, and be resolute in the non-use of our wyrd.

“Besides,” Grace sniffed, settling her gray robes about her with a shift of her shoulders. “There will come a time soon enough for us to use our wyrd, a time when I’m sure we will be forced to use it, and I think we should reserve all our wyrd for that time. There’s a good chance that we’ll never come out of this, we must all understand that.”

“It would be a willing sacrifice,” Rosalee said, and Dalah looked to her feet. Grace knew that it would not be such a willing sacrifice for Dalah.

“You had to have known that it might come to that, Dalah,” Grace said. “I know what you are leaving behind, and that you love your immortality more than anything save Fairview Heights.”

“It’s not that I love my immortality more than anything else, Grace, it’s that I’m not willing to lose the two of you yet. Despite you being an insufferable sow.” She sniffed haughtily and rolled her shoulders as if rolling off her bad mood. “You say it so casually, as if death is nothing.”

“It’s the final rest with the Goddess for a life well-lived. Even so, however, I’m not ready to die yet,” Grace confirmed.

“Besides, you have said it, I’m immortal, and so I will not get the fair exchange of death for my services. No, I will be forever scarred.” It was true; Dalah would live through whatever they faced, which might not be something to look forward to.

As they stepped further into the room they had to pick their way around splintered wood, making Grace think of a huge tree being blasted apart all over the floor at their feet. From the carvings Grace could see on some of the larger pieces, she would wager this was what had become of the door.

“Just like their mother,” Dalah commented. “Slash your way through, and leave destruction in your wake.”

“It does pose another problem for us,” Grace said.

“And that is?”

“Come on, you know that the entrance to the Well of Wyrding lies within this room. All the rubble needs to be cleaned away first, a task I would not wish to give to the mercy of your wyrd, Dalah, as you will need all you have in store for the future task. Besides, the Goddess only knows what would happen with wyrd’s current state of flux.” Grace peered up through the gap the ceiling had created when it fell, to where the light of the rising sun bathed the tips of trees high above. The birds lamented the early morning sky, tinged in hues of orange, pink and lavender.

Grace thought then of the fairies that had led her here; about now they would go into suspended animation, without the light of the moon to keep their little bodies going. Sylvie’s children were being led by a fairy, which meant they would be settling down to sleep just about now, if Porillon had not already caught up to them and finished them off. Grace looked back at the room with a thought that maybe that was not the case at all, maybe Porillon was the one being finished off. After all it had been Porillon the ceiling had fallen on; Grace knew because the sorceress had come out of the building last, looking rather beaten up.

“Not necessarily,” Rosalee disagreed, breaking the spell of the moment. “Whenever Pharoh showed us the Well of Wyrding it was in this room, yet not of this world, almost as if this chamber were the portal that transported us to the well.” The redhead looked at the other two. “Remember, the Well of Wyrding is found within a grand hall; it doesn’t look like this place at all. It is at the end of that hall we always found the well.”

“Even so, we would still have to assemble here, and at our age I do not trust stealth to keep us atop all that fallen stone.” Grace pointed to the glowing masses of stone piled twice her height in the center of the room. The head and hands of the Goddess statue at the back of the temple could be barely seen in the glowing light of the lamps Grace knew rested at her feet. Though the stone had toppled from its original foundation, it still glowed softly in response to the moon, now fading due to the rising sun.

“I think that sleep is in order first,” Dalah said around a yawn. They had all been on the road for a very long time without proper food or sleep, and she wanted both of those things before she set herself to the physical task of moving all that stone.

“I will prepare the beds,” Rosalee agreed.

As they made their way to the kitchens and bed chambers below the Mirror of the Moon, there was one question on Grace’s mind that she left unasked: What had happened to Amber?